Blog: Krish Krishnan

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The importance of Infrastructure teams

In my opinion the most overlooked team in any project is the infrastructure team. This is very true of data warehouse initiatives. Most often the infrastructure team is taken for granted as the "in guys" who know how to put together machines, storage and databases. This kind of an assumed role and responsibility often leads to missed opportunities to communicate clearly and then there is a lot of rework or redesign etc.

We need to move away from this attitude to start involving the infrastructure team in any data warehousing project from the get go. This will enable the infrastructure team to start understanding the system requirements and expectations at a much better and deeper level, which will help the overall solution design and development.

Involving the DBA team for example from the last stages of requirements finalization to logical data model design, will enable them to design a physical database design with the right kind of key and data structures that will require minimal tuning or any other rework once designed and implemented.

Infrastructure is a monumental piece of effort in any data warehouse project and with the rapidly changing technology advancements, the sooner the better.

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